Reaping the Rewards of the Sprialed Curriculum

We launched into our short story writing unit yesterday. As my teaching partner and I were reviewing the unit earlier in the week, we had a pause and reflect moment. We realized three important things that impacted our planning:

1. Our students have been writing realistic fiction stories every year since third grade.
2. According to their personal narratives earlier in the year, they are good storytellers-- focusing in on moments, using dialogue and description to show, not tell, and developing one character.
3. They are fanatics about fantasy books, especially dystopian science fiction and modern mythology.

And so we turned to the Grade 8 Curricular Plan for Writing Workshop (Calkins & TCRWP, Heinemann, 2011) and its Fantasy Writing Unit to modify our realistic fiction unit into a fantasy unit. This propelled us to consider lessons about making fantasy settings realistic (or at least believable), introducing magic early in the story so that the amazing object or power that saves the day doesn't come
out of the blue, and keeping tight control over the length and focus of the plot. It also sent us back to our bookshelves to find mentor texts that are short and highlight the teaching point within the fantasy genre. It was a bit of a scramble because of the narrow time frame we'd given ourselves, but it was worth it when I heard the loud cheer that greeted the announcement, "We're writing fantasy this year!"

Four years ago, when our group went to the TCRWP Writing Institute, we were just developing the genre-based unit spiral in middle school. The elementary school was only about a year ahead of us with implementing the TCRWP Units of Study in Writing, so our students coming into middle school were also new to the spiral. As we looked over the middle school units, which included historical fiction in grades six and seven, and fantasy in grade eight, we knew our kids just weren't ready for them. Nor were we. We agreed to stick to realistic fiction, also units in the grades six and seven curricula, so that our kids could solidify the short story fiction genre.

This year we get to reap the rewards of the spiralled curriculum. Our kids, and we teachers, are ready for the new and exciting challenge of fantasy writing. We will build on the solid base the students already have as fiction writers, inserting new twists to an established skill set. We will add scaffolds and reteach previous grades' lessons for those who have not yet reached the level of the rest of the class, either because of development or because they are new to our school. And we will open up the world of imagination to a group who is steeped in futuristic settings, magical worlds, mythological creatures, and sophisticated issues of tyranny, power struggles, discrimination, and environmental collapse. I can't wait to see what they come up with!